Hi, I am looking for mods that add animated hair and animated faces. I tried out the eyes for better heads mod, but that one was really creepy what with their being dead and still moving their eyes.... but are there any mods that add faces that animate through different expressions? and are there any mods that add animated hair? Thanks in advance!

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6630. You have to texture them yourself though.

there is a video on youtube of an animated hair. but the guy never made a release.

MW heads are animated with two morphs: mouth open/close; eyes open/close. These two animations are somehow controlled by the game engine (there is no way to script them of use text keys like in Oblivion FaceGen “lipsync”): I guess eyes are blinking randomly; mouth opening is probably correlated with the volume of executed voice file at a certain moment. Unfortunately, there is no way to add totally new animation sequences in MW in general, not only for heads (“different expressions”), the game engine will not “recognize” that.
I cannot say anything about BH models but in my tests (with heads modeled by me) after execution of death animation sequence eyes are not moving.

These hair nifs at PES are not “animated”: they are simply skinned/physiqued to existing bones. The main goal was to “minimize” clipping of long hair wigs. The solution is cheap. To create really animated hair is a challenging task especially if you want to synchronize it with body animations. Meshes have original Ren’s UVs, so only texture paths should be edited in NifScope.

Would it be possible to make an animated model, with idle stuff, and apply it as a head?

MCA uses "masks" to randomize NPC faces, with the condition that these masks do not follow the normal face rules. Perhaps something could be built upon that?

A skilled texture artist could fake some effects with an animated texture, but I don't think there's much you can do with the model itself without animating the movements with help from the Morrowind Code Patch's animation engine changes.

Wait, does this mean heads can be skinned? and does that mean that one could make s seamless head by welding on the bb neck and weighting it?

Not sure if it's related, but bahamut mentioned that he was working on something seamless like this.
Dude's got more wips than a Drow priestess.

Absolutely priceless! :rofl: Truly sig worthy.

So much to do, so little time

So yea i wanted to see the try making head-neck seamless
http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9065/screenshot1dr.jpg
It works pretty good for playble races with one head, but still we got some visible seams at neck-body but its fault of MW's lightning,
Other problem is that the head is not visible in chargen because its positioned beyond the camera (future MPC camera hack fix mabye?), weighting two necks (one neck is build in head and the second is standalone fitting the body) without overlapping can be a little troubling to but i think its possible, but there's one big problem that cannot be solved, as the head is skinned its morphs dont work (CTD?)

Well there you go then, I was about to dive in to investigate this, thanks mate I would have wasted so much time. What you've done does look absolutely grand though, though the head does look suspiciously like it's from another game :frog:

I'm not sure because it's been a while but there is a specific bone for the face and the hair, right? I physiqued a hair so there must be one I guess. If that is the case, then why not weigh the bottom of the neck entirely on the neck bone or whatever bone the neck is using by default and then as you go up making vertices more and more dependent of the movements of the head bone until at the top, at the line between the neck and head, the vertices are weighed to follow the head bone and only that. If the head and neck meshes are modeled correctly (ie it's the same mesh just cut at the bottom of the head, a la BB) it could work, couldn't it? And you wouldn't have to physique/skin/rig the head mesh and would get to keep facial animations.

If that makes any sense

edit: Bahamut, if you physique the head and don't see it in the race selection menu at the beginning of the game, try cloning your head mesh, removing all physique/skin data from the clone, renaming it to something else than the name of a bone, then moving it to 0,0,0. The clone should appear in chargen, but only then. It worked for me for my lady pirate hairstyle mod (I find the mesh crappy but you can still download it off pes to see what I mean, just load it up in nifskope)

I find topics like this sobering because it shows a massive waste of what could have been. As I recall, someone was working on eyes that followed the player around so that when you were near an NPC, it would glance at you. Little effects like this combined with physiqued hair would make so much of a difference. I've never minded the skinned faces as they're capable of being so high resolution that, in my opinion, the look better than anything save for the most cutting edge faces in video games and CGI work. As I'm not good with textures or models I can't possible suggest anyone do such a thing, but what I would give for a combined effort to give Morrowind a 100% facelift rather than individuals releasing separate packages for different aspects that often are inconsistent with each other.